Assemblies of Sorrow: Performances of Black Endangerment in the Jim Crow Era - REVIEW

by Samuel Ng

During the Jim Crow era, Black activists appealed to a diverse population of migrating Black Americans by making them viscerally feel that the threat of anti-Black violence continued to afflict them as a group and to undergird blackness itself. To this end, they organized public gatherings, mostly comprised of Black people, that fostered fears of looming physical harm.

Samuel Galen Ng illuminates this Black consciousness as it emanated from feelings of collective endangerment. The dissemination and intensification of such feelings became a pivotal way of solidifying a national Black consciousness on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement. Ng examines how performances of Black endangerment performed political work that provided Black people with important means of political organizing and insurgency. As Ng shows, the grief and mourning that took place at the performances provided public spaces for individuals and communities to observe specific losses capable of impacting Americans across the country.

Ambitious and interdisciplinary, Assemblies of Sorrow explores an overlooked facet of Black organizing and protest and traces how activists shaped fear and grief into political action.

Samuel Galen Ng is an associate professor of Africana studies at Smith College.

University of Illinois Press
ISBN-13: 978-0252089404

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights - REVIEW

by Dylan C. Penningroth 

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.

In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself―the laws all of us live under today.

Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story―their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Prize fellow and author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, he lives in Kensington, California.

Dylan Penningroth is the winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, Winner of the Beveridge Award, American Historical Association, Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association, Winner of the John Philip Reid Award, American Society for Legal History, Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award, Winner of the Charles Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association, Winner of the Scribes Book Award, Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historian, Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, Winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize, Finalist for the Cundill History Prize, Shortlisted for the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History, Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize, Columbia Journalism School, and Shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa.

Liveright
ISBN-13: 978-1324093107

The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887–1937 - REVIEW

by Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

An authoritative anthology tracing the history of one of the most important concepts Black people drew on to challenge the brutal, totalizing system of Jim Crow racism.

This book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the “New Negro,” charting how generations of thinkers debated its meaning and seized on its potency to stake out an astonishingly broad and sometimes contradictory range of ideological positions. It features dozens of newly unearthed pieces by major figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston as well as writings from Cuba, the US Virgin Islands, Dominica, France, Sierra Leone, South Africa, colonial Zimbabwe, and the United States. Demonstrating how this evocative and supremely protean concept predates its popularization in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology of the same name, The New Negro takes readers from its beginnings as a response to Henry Grady’s famous “New South” address in 1886 through the Harlem Renaissance and the New Deal.

Opening a fascinating window into a largely unexplored chapter in African American, Afro-Latin American, and African intellectual history, this groundbreaking anthology includes writings by Gwendolyn Bennett, Marita Bonner, John Edward Bruce (“Bruce Grit”), Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Bertram Clarke (“José Clarana,” “Jaime Gil”), Anna Julia Cooper, Alexander Crummell, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, D. Hamilton Jackson, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Oscar Micheaux, Jeanne “Jane” Nardal, Jean Toomer, Gustavo Urrutia, Booker T. Washington, Dorothy West, Ruth Whitehead Whaley, Fannie Barrier Williams, Carter G. Woodson, and a host of others.

Martha H. Patterson is professor of English at McKendree University. Her books include The Harlem Renaissance Weekly: Reading the New Negro in Jazz Age African American Newspapers. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the host of Finding Your Roots on PBS and the author of many books, including The Black Box: Writing the Race.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691268590

NORVEL: An American Hero – REVIEW

by Kenneth F. Conklin

NORVEL: An American Hero tells the incredible story of Virginia's first Black Olympic gold medalist at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952.

Norvel Lee is a man whose unwavering determination and courage allowed him to overcome obstacles and achieve greatness. Born in a time of racial discrimination. Norvel faced numerous challenges early in life. However, he refused to be defeated and used his intelligence and athletic abilities to propel himself towards success. As he grew into a young man, Norvel continued to face adversity but his commitment to his community, country, and family never waivered. His unprecedented achievements in business, sports, and military service makes him a true representation of the American dream. This inspiring and uplifting story of perseverance is a must-read for anyone in need of motivation and a reminder of the power of the human spirit.

Kenneth F. Conklin LLC
ISBN-13  978-1734480726

Racial Domination - REVIEW

by Loïc Wacquant

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth.

Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability-notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality.

Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice.

Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.

Polity
ISBN-13: 978-1509563029

Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom - REVIEW

by R. Isabela Morales

A poignant, multi-generational saga of a mixed-race family in the US West and South from the antebellum period through the rise of Jim Crow.

When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves.

In this deeply researched, movingly narrated portrait of the extended Townsend family, R. Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. In Morales's telling, the Townsends' story maps a new landscape of opportunity and oppression, where the meanings of race and freedom--as well as opportunities for social and economic mobility--were dictated by highly local circumstances.

During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty.

Oxford University Press
ISBN-13 978-0197786574

Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity - REVIEW

by Adam McKible

In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense.

Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.

Columbia University Press
ISBN-13 978-0231212649

Reckoning with Race: An Unfinished Journey - REVIEW

by Frederick Allen

In his fifty-year career as an award-winning journalist, CNN commentator, and author of multiple books, Rick Allen has had a front-row seat on dramatic change in race relations in America. In Reckoning with Race, a collection of eighteen essays, he explores his ongoing efforts to understand the struggle of black and white Americans to navigate a shared history at once wicked and intimate, full of love and hate, as they seek to level an uneven playing field. Allen examines issues from the era of Reconstruction through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the rhythms of resistance and progress, into today’s contentious debates over redlining, reparations, and critical race theory.

Starting as a reporter with the Atlanta Constitution in 1972, Allen got to know and befriend legendary black political figures including Julian Bond, John Lewis, Andy Young, Hosea Williams, Maynard Jackson, Jesse Jackson, and Daddy King, the father of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also encountered ardent white segregationists, some of whom saw the light and others who took their racism to the grave. Drawing on his experience covering politics, he examines presidents from LBJ and Jimmy Carter to Obama and Trump. He explores the symbolism of Confederate flags, the controversy over Uncle Remus, the election of Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, and the tragic case of the Atlanta Child Murders. He has had first-hand encounters with white supremacy and violent black protest alike.

Throughout Reckoning with Race, Allen is candid about his own shortcomings as a white native Northerner learning gradually about the complexities of race in his adoptive South. The essays highlight his continuing journey toward understanding the forces that both hinder and promote equality and harmony between the races.

Frederick Allen is the author of three books. His history of the Coca-Cola Company, Secret Formula, was published by HarperCollins in 1994 and has been translated into seven languages. Atlanta Rising, a history of modern Atlanta, was published by Longstreet in 1996 and is taught at several colleges. A Decent, Orderly Lynching, Allen’s account of the vigilantes of Montana, was published in 2004 by University of Oklahoma Press. His research into vigilante symbolism was cited by the Western History Association.

Forefront Books
ISBN-13 978-1637631522

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners - REVIEW

by Margaret A. Burnham

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law?

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.

Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13 978-0393867855

Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas - REVIEW

by Terry Anne Scott

In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.

Terry Anne Scott is associate professor of American history and chair of the History Department at Hood College. She is the editor of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City.

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association

University of Arkansas Press
ISBN-13 978-1682262184

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert - REVIEW

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy's encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia's Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert's Black community and the people, including Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother's love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.

Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.

Whiskey, Women, and War: How the Great War Shaped Jim Crow New Orleans by Brian Altobello - REVIEW

Entering World War I in 1917, a burst of patriotism in New Orleans collided with civil liberties. The city, due to its French heritage, shared a strong cultural tie to the Allies, and French speakers from Louisiana provided vital technical assistance to the US military during the war effort. Meanwhile, citizens of German heritage were harassed by unscrupulous, ill-trained volunteers of the American Protective League, ordained by the Justice Department to shield America from enemies within. As a major port, the wartime mobilization dramatically reshaped the cultural landscape of the city in ways that altered the national culture, especially as jazz musicians spread outward from the vice districts.

Whiskey, Women, and War: How the Great War Shaped Jim Crow New Orleans surveys the various ways the city confronted the demands of World War I under the supervision of a dynamic political machine boss. Author Brian Altobello analyzes the mobilization of the local population in terms of enlistments and war bond sales and addresses the anti-vice crusade meant to safeguard the American war effort, giving attention to Prohibition and the closure of the red-light district known as Storyville. He studies the political fistfight over women’s suffrage, as New Orleans’s Gordon sisters demanded the vote predicated on the preservation of white supremacy. Finally, he examines race relations in the city, as African Americans were integrated into the city’s war effort and cultural landscape even as Jim Crow was firmly established. Ultimately, the volume brings to life this history of a city that endured World War I in its own singular style.

Humane Insights: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death - REVIEW

      Americans have long viewed historical images of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body from a safe distance. Questioning the relationship between spectator and victim, Courtney R. Baker urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the “gaze” to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering. She utilizes the visual studies concept termed the “look” to examine how people articulated and recognized notions of humanity in oft-referenced moments within the African American experience: the graphic brutality of the 1834 Lalaurie affair; Without Sanctuary, the groundbreaking photographic exhibition of lynching; Emmett Till’s murder and funeral; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Contemplating these and other episodes, Baker traces how proponents of black freedom and dignity use the visual display of violence against the black body to galvanize action against racial injustice.

An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, Humane Insight asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture, and reveals how representations of pain can become the currency of black liberation from injustice.

“With perceptive and original analysis, Baker moves us through a series of historical moments when images of black pain and death made black suffering legible to a wider public.”
-Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle; Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

“This groundbreaking book is a corrective to recent arguments that have misunderstood the role of representations of black suffering and death in empowering a people. With insight and keen observation, it illuminates how proponents of black freedom and dignity employed difficult images to alter public opinion and spur change.”
-Maurice Berger, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Courtney R. Baker is an associate professor of American studies and Black studies at Occidental College.

Humane Insights: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death
ISBN: 978-0-252-08299-3
University of Illinois Press, 139 pages

Tacit Racism - REVIEW

 
Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States-especially White people-do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations into taken-for-granted practices that reproduce the biases in our society. These practices can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. That is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.

In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck draw on real-world examples to illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged-but endangering society itself. Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

Anne Warfield Rawls is professor of sociology at Bentley University, research professor of socio-informatics at the University of Siegen, German, and senior fellow with the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. She is the author of Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life” and the editor of Harold Garfinkle’s work Towards a Sociological Theory of Information; Seeing Sociologically; and Parsons’ Primer.

Waverly Duck is associate professor of sociology and director of urban studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Tacit Racism
The University of Chicago Press, 289 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-226-70369-5

The Princeton Fugitive Slave by Lolita Inniss - REVIEW

I never got no free papers. Princeton College bought me; Princeton College owns me. 

James Collins Johnson made his name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey, where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a student from Maryland~ arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. On the eve of his rendition, after attempts to free Johnson by force had failed, a local aristocratic white woman purchased Johnson's freedom, allowing him to avoid re­enslavement. The Princeton Fugitive Slave reconstructs James Collins Johnson's life, from birth and enslaved life in Maryland to his daring escape, sensational trial for re-enslavement, and last-minute change of fortune, and through to the end of his life in Princeton, where he remained a figure of local fascination. 

Stories of Johnson's life in Princeton often describe him as a contented, jovial soul, beloved on campus and memorialized on his gravestone as "The Students Friend." But these familiar accounts come from student writings and sentimental recollections in alumni reports-stories from elite, predominantly white, often southern sources whose relationships with Johnson were hopelessly distorted by differences in race and social standing. In interrogating these stories against archival records, newspaper accounts, courtroom narratives, photographs, and family histories, author Lolita Buckner Inniss builds a picture of Johnson on his own terms, piecing together the sparse evidence and disaggregating him from the other black vendors with whom he was sometimes confused. 
By telling Johnson's story and examining the relationship between antebellum Princeton's black residents and the economic engine that supported their community, the book questions the distinction between employment and servitude that shrinks and threatens to disappear when an individual's freedom is circumscribed by immobility, lack of opportunity, and contingency on local interpretations of a hotly contested body of law. 

About the Author - Lolita Buckner Inniss, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D., is a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, where she is a Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow. Her research addresses historic, geographic, metaphoric, and visual norms of law, especially in the context of race, gender, and comparative constitutionalism. 

The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson by Lolita Buckner Inniss
Fordham University Press
Hardcover - 3 September 2019 - ISBN: 918-0-8232-8534-l
$29.95, 272 pages, 14 b/w illustrations eBook Available 

Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity by Ersula J. Ore - REVIEW

A rhetorical framework to comprehend anti-black violence today within racialized citizenship since reconstruction.

While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited and embodied links between violent collective action, American civic identity, and the making of the nation.

Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.

Grounded in Ida B. Wells' summation of lynching as a social contract among whites to maintain a racial order, at its core, Ore's book speaks to racialized violence as a mode of civic engagement. Since violence enacts an argument about citizenship, Ore construes lynching and its expressions as part and parcel of America's rhetorical tradition and political legacy.

Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. In doing so, she demonstrates how lynching functioned as a strategy interwoven with the formation of America's national identity and with the nation's need to continually restrict and redefine that identity. In addition, Ore ties black resistance to lynching, the acclaimed exhibit Without Sanctuary, recent police brutality, effigies of Barack Obama, and the killing of Trayvon Martin.

ERSULA J. ORE is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in the School of Social Transformation and assistant professor of African and African American studies and rhetoric at Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education as well as Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture and Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.

Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity by Ersula J. Ore
University Press of Mississippi  ●  ISBN 978-1-4968-2408-0 ● paper

The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law - How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America

The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law
How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America

by Louis Menand

     White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” the Iowa congressman Steve King inquired of a Times reporter last month. After the remark blew up, King explained that by “that language” he was referring to “Western civilization.” He also said that he condemned white nationalism and white supremacy as an “evil and bigoted ideology which saw in its ultimate expression the systematic murder of six million innocent Jewish lives.” (It’s unclear whether King thinks of Jews as nonwhite.)
     However, to answer the congressman’s original question: only after a long struggle. Seventeen states had laws banning interracial marriage, which is pretty much the heart of the doctrine of white supremacy, until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. From the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American race relations were largely shaped by states that had seceded from the Union in 1861, and the elected leaders of those states almost all spoke the language of white supremacy. They did not use dog whistles. “White Supremacy” was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, until 1995.
     How did this happen? How did white people in a part of the country that was virtually destroyed by war contrive to take political control of their states, install manifestly undemocratic regimes in them, maintain those regimes for nearly a century, and effectively block the national government from addressing racial inequality everywhere else? Part of the answer is that those people had a lot of help. Institutions constitutionally empowered to intervene twisted themselves every which way to explain why, in this matter, intervention was not part of the job description. One such institution was the Supreme Court of the United States.
     The case of Martha Lum is typical. She was the daughter of Jeu Gong Lum, who came to the United States from China in 1904. After being smuggled across the Canadian border by human traffickers, he made his way to the Mississippi Delta, where a relative ran a grocery store. In 1913, he married another Chinese immigrant, and they opened their own store. They had three children and gave them American names.
     In 1923, the family moved to Rosedale, Mississippi, and Martha, then eight years old, entered the local public school. According to Adrienne Berard, who tells the Lums’ story in “Water Tossing Boulders” (2016), nothing seemed amiss for the first year, but when Martha returned to school after the summer the principal relayed the news that the school board had ordered her to be expelled. Public schools in Mississippi had been racially segregated by law since 1890, and her school educated only whites. The board had decided that Martha was not white and, consequently, she could not study there.
The Lums engaged a lawyer, who managed to get a writ of mandamus—an order that a legal duty be carried out—served on the school board. The board, which must have been very surprised, contested the writ, and the case went to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which ruled that the board had the right to expel Martha Lum on racial grounds. That part was not so surprising.
     The court acknowledged that there was no statutory definition of the “colored race” in Mississippi. But it argued that the term should be construed in the broadest sense, and cited a case it had decided eight years earlier, upholding the right of a school board to expel from an all-white school two children whose great-aunts were rumored to have married nonwhites.
     That decision, the court said, showed that the term “colored” was not restricted to “persons having negro blood in their veins”—apparently since the children involved were in fact white. Martha Lum did not have “negro blood,” either, but she was not white. She could attend a “colored” school. Mississippi’s separate-schools law, the court explained, was enacted “to prevent race amalgamation.” Then why place an Asian-American child in a school with African-American children? Because, according to the court, the law was intended to serve “the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race.”
     The Lums appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1868. The first clause of that amendment is the most radically democratic clause in the entire Constitution, much of which was designed to limit what the Founders considered the dangers of too much democracy. It decrees that any person born in the United States is a citizen, and that states may not abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; nor deprive them of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny them the equal protection of the laws. The United States has two founding documents: the Constitution, which is a legal rule book, and the Declaration of Independence, a manifesto with no force of law. The Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the Declaration.
     The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case, Lum v. Rice, was handed down in 1927, three years after Congress passed the Johnson-Reed immigration act, which barred all Asians from entering the United States. Was Martha Lum a citizen? The Supreme Court said she was. Was she being denied the equal protection of the laws? The Court said that she was not, and cited a series of precedents in which courts had upheld the constitutionality of school segregation.
     It was true, the Court conceded, that most of those cases had involved African-American children. But it couldn’t see that “pupils of the yellow races” were any different, and the decision to expel such pupils was, it held, “within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.” Even though the Mississippi court had stated that the purpose of the school-segregation law was to preserve “the purity and integrity of the white race,” it was not a denial of equal protection to nonwhites. The Lums, of course, knew from firsthand observation what it meant to be classified as “colored” in Mississippi, and they did what a lot of African-American Mississippians were also doing—they left the state.
     The decision in Lum v. Rice was unanimous. The opinion of the Court was delivered by the Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, a former President of the United States; among the Justices who heard the case were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Brandeis. One of the precedents the Court quoted prominently in support of its decision was a case it had decided thirty-one years earlier—Plessy v. Ferguson.
     After Dred Scott, Plessy is probably the most notorious decision involving race in the history of the United States Supreme Court. It is the case identified with the principle of “separate but equal”—the theory that segregation is not per se discrimination. Plessy is the decision the Supreme Court had to overturn, in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, to declare that school segregation violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
     From our perspective, therefore, Plessy looks huge. So it’s revealing that, as the journalist Steve Luxenberg tells us in “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation,” little note was taken of the decision at the time. Even when principal figures in the case died, years later, their obituaries made no mention of it. It’s revealing because it suggests that Plessy should never have been brought in the first place. The decision did not create a new justification for racial segregation; it locked an old one into place.
     Plessy was a test case. It challenged a law that Louisiana passed in 1890, the Separate Car Act, requiring railroads to maintain separate cars for white and “colored” riders—in order, according to the act, “to promote the comfort of passengers.” The penalty for breaking the law was a fine or a short prison sentence. Transportation had been segregated in parts of the country, both North and South, since long before the Civil War, and many cases had been brought by passengers complaining of discrimination, with mixed success. But in those cases segregation was a matter of company policy. In the Louisiana case, the constitutionality of a state law was at issue.
     When the South began instituting Jim Crow, after the end of Reconstruction, laws mandating separate cars on trains appeared across the region. One of the first was passed in Florida, in 1887, followed by Mississippi, in 1888, and Texas, in 1889. When Louisiana passed its separate-cars law, a New Orleans lawyer and newspaper editor named Louis Martinet—his mother was born a slave; his father, a Belgian, bought her freedom—formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, and set about building a case.
     First, Martinet approached the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which agreed to act as a silent partner. It did not do so out of altruism. From a business point of view, segregation represented a cost—the cost of providing separate facilities for black customers. It would have been cheaper for the railroads if the state had mandated integration instead.
     Then Martinet recruited a plaintiff, Daniel Desdunes, a young mixed-race musician whose father was on the Committee. On February 24, 1892, Desdunes boarded a train in New Orleans with a ticket for Mobile, Alabama, and sat in a car reserved for whites. He was duly arrested and charged, his case set to be heard by the criminal-court judge in New Orleans, John Ferguson. All had gone as planned, but then, in another case, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the Separate Car Act did not apply to interstate passengers. Because Desdunes had been going to another state, he could not be required to use a separate car, and the prosecution dropped the case.
     The interstate-travel issue was a persistent wrinkle in the Jim Crow era, and it inspired some impressive judicial contortions. In 1878, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Reconstruction-era Louisiana statute requiring integrated facilities on steamboats. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Because riverboats stopped in many states, the Court said, they could not be bound by the regulations of one state.
     You might assume that a state law requiring segregated facilities on interstate carriers would be subject to the same prohibition. In 1890, however, the Supreme Court held otherwise. It declared that an interstate train was subject to a Mississippi law requiring separate cars for “colored” and white passengers for as long as the train was in Mississippi. The Court somehow parsed its way around its own earlier decision.
     But now, because of the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling, Martinet needed another volunteer scofflaw. Fortunately, he had one at hand: Homer Plessy. Like Desdunes, Plessy was light-skinned—“fair-skinned enough to cause confusion,” as Luxenberg puts it, suggesting that Plessy might have been accustomed to passing, as many nominally “colored” people in New Orleans did. He was twenty-nine years old, married, and in the shoemaking business. Like Desdunes, he followed the script. On June 7, 1892, he boarded a train, one travelling only within the state of Louisiana, and sat in the car for white passengers. When the conductor asked if Plessy was colored, he said yes, and was removed from the train and booked. (Train conductors were in a ridiculous position: even if the law required trains to have separate cars, riders could still sue the conductor for misclassifying them.)
     Plessy came before the same Judge Ferguson, who ruled that, since there had been no claim that the cars for white and black passengers were not “equal,” there was no constitutional issue. The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed, adding that, if the Separate Cars Act were declared unconstitutional, many other state laws—on separate schools, intermarriage, and so forth—would be affected. The U.S. Supreme Court finally heard the case four years later, and on May 18, 1896, it issued its opinion.
     As Luxenberg points out, the concept “separate but equal” (the phrase the Court used in Plessy was actually “equal but separate”) was hardly a novelty. It had been a customary way to throw out complaints about segregation since before the Civil War. In Plessy, the Court added a gloss that became almost as famous as the phrase itself: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” it said. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” As Charles Black, a Yale law professor, wrote of these sentences many years later, “The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.”
     The assumption that separate facilities for blacks—railroad cars, steamboat berths, schools—were not inferior is a good example of the Supreme Court’s formalism in that period of American law. Everyone knew the assumption was false. The Jim Crow train car was sometimes called “the dirt car,” and “colored” schools were often shacks. It was also absurd to claim that the “badge of inferiority” was a black person’s construction. In Dred Scott, the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, had said that, constitutionally, black people were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
     In Brown v. Board of Education, the Warren Court would cite psychological studies showing that black children are harmed by segregation. That’s not something a nineteenth-century court would have considered appropriate (and some people did not consider it appropriate in Brown). In cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court looked to the text of the statute. If the statute did not prescribe unequal conditions, then, legally, conditions were not unequal.
     The Justices in the Plessy case were aware of the repercussions that a robust interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would have, of course. Political realities, as always, put a constraint on judicial reasoning. The Supreme Court in the early twentieth century did decide cases in favor of African-American and Asian-American plaintiffs, but it mostly kept its hands off state racial regulations.
     When Louis Martinet formed his Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, he wrote to Frederick Douglass and asked for his support. Douglass refused. He said he could not see how the case could help things. Douglass was proved correct. The decision was the worst possible outcome, and the one Plessy’s lawyers had feared. It stamped a constitutional seal of approval on state-mandated racial segregation. The case may not have received much press attention at the time, but over the next fifty years it was cited in thirteen Supreme Court opinions.
     It’s true that in 1890, when the Separate Car Act was passed, Southern race relations were still somewhat in flux. Blacks voted and were politically active. The Louisiana legislature that passed the act had sixteen African-American members. And the composition of the Supreme Court is subject to change; the lawyers for Plessy might have hoped that they would draw a winning hand.
   By 1896, though, the endgame was clearly in view. Six years earlier, Mississippi had become the first state to contrive laws to disenfranchise black voters, rather than rely solely on terror and fraud. Other states followed, although extralegal methods remained in use, and, by the end of the century, the work of disenfranchisement was complete. There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero.
     As for the Supreme Court, it had already made the character of its commitment to civil rights clear. In 1873, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to most state laws. And in 1883 it struck down the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875—Congress’s last attempt to address civil rights until 1957.
“When a man has emerged from slavery,” the Court said in 1883, “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” Slavery had been abolished for just eighteen years, but the Court felt that that was enough time for African-Americans to get on their feet.
     As Richard White tells us in his excellent volume on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, published as part of the also excellent Oxford History of the United States, between seventy-eight and a hundred and sixty-one black men were lynched every year in the decade from 1890 to 1899. It was the height of wishful thinking in 1896 to imagine that the Court would undergo a conversion in the case of Homer Plessy. The only consolation Plessy’s advocates had was that, when they brought their case, there were a hundred others also challenging segregation laws in the courts. If it hadn’t been Plessy, it would have been someone else.
     Luxenberg has chosen a fresh way to tell the story of Plessy. “Separate” is a group biography of three figures in the case: Albion Tourgée, one of Plessy’s lawyers; Henry Billings Brown, the Justice who wrote the majority opinion; and John Marshall Harlan, who filed the lone dissent.
     Edmund Wilson, in “Patriotic Gore” (1962), his book on the literature of the Civil War, describes Tourgée as “an obstinate man, physically and morally courageous, with bad judgment in practical matters and possessed by an intransigent idealism,” and Luxenberg’s portrait is much the same. Tourgée fought in the Union Army and was badly wounded. After the war, he moved with his wife and daughter to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was active politically and as a writer and speaker on behalf of Republican policies. He called himself “a carpet-bagger of the very worst sort.”
     But by 1877, the year the Army was pulled out of the South and Reconstruction ended, he had come to believe that the whole effort was an exercise in hubris—which would be the line on Reconstruction for decades afterward, and the line taken in two of the most popular Hollywood movies ever made: “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone with the Wind” (1939). In 1879, Tourgée published a novel whose title expressed his judgment on Reconstruction—“A Fool’s Errand.” The book was compared with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and became a big best-seller. It made Tourgée famous and, for a short time, wealthy.
     Tourgée’s empathy for the Southern point of view did not erode his commitment to racial justice. After leaving North Carolina, he moved to upstate New York and began writing a column under the name Bystander, advocating for racial equality. At Martinet’s invitation, he served as an adviser on the Plessy case, and was instrumental in devising the legal strategy. He presented the case in oral argument before the Supreme Court.
Luxenberg is kinder in his treatment of that argument than other commentators have been. Instead of the standard claim that segregation was a denial of equal protection, Tourgée argued that it was a denial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. A person’s reputation is property, he said, like an inheritance; and “the most precious of all inheritances is the reputation of being white.” In being denied seating in the white car, Plessy was deprived of his property without due process of law.
     The theory is less cockeyed than it sounds. It turns on the absence of a definition of “colored” in Louisiana law. Tourgée was saying to the Justices: Louisiana law gives state officials complete discretion in determining racial identity. Homer Plessy looks a lot like you. If someone with authority to do so classified you as nonwhite, would you view the situation with equanimity? No, you would think that you had been deprived of something without due process of law.
     This is basically the situation the Lums would complain of three decades later. In both cases, the argument was both an appeal to the racial prejudices of the Justices and essentially a racist argument in itself. Whatever the calculation, it went over the heads of the Court. Justice Brown, in his opinion, expressed bafflement. Plessy was colored, he said. How could he be deprived of something—“the reputation of being a white man”—that he never had?
     Richard Kluger, in his landmark history of Brown v. Board of Education, “Simple Justice” (1975), called Justice Brown “one of the Court’s dimmer lights,” and nothing Luxenberg tells us suggests that this was unfair. Brown was from Lee, in western Massachusetts. He went to Yale, then pursued a legal career in Detroit. Like most Northerners, he was a Unionist, not an abolitionist, and he paid a substitute to take his place in the war rather than be drafted, as was perfectly legal. He married a woman with a large inheritance and cultivated a high style of living. He campaigned for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 Presidential election. Grant gave him a federal judgeship in 1875, and he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Benjamin Harrison in 1890.
     Brown’s goals in life, Luxenberg says, were “ascent, dignity, money, stature.” He almost certainly saw his opinion in Plessy as a routine disposition of a familiar challenge. What gave his opinion significance was its sweeping justification for segregation laws, and its timing, right at the moment that Jim Crow descended like a cage on the South.
The establishment of Jim Crow was not simply a matter of laws suppressing African-American voting and segregating schools and transportation, or of a pattern of social practices that became ingrained. Jim Crow was a regime that was created over and over again. In 1930, the city of Birmingham made it illegal for a black person and a white person to play dominoes or checkers together. In 1932, Atlanta prohibited amateur baseball clubs of different races from playing within two blocks of each other. In 1935, Oklahoma required the separation of races when fishing or boating. In 1937, Arkansas segregated its horse-racing tracks. Jim Crow required a constant reminder of who was in charge. Its mania for racial separatism was insatiable.
     Harlan, the dissenter in Plessy, came from a family with a long history in Kentucky politics. His father was a U.S. congressman; his grandson, also John Marshall Harlan, became an Associate Justice on the Warren Court. Kentucky was a border state—it allowed slavery but did not secede—and Harlan began his career as a pro-slavery Unionist. He led a regiment against rebel forces in Kentucky, but he and his family had owned slaves, and he condemned the Thirteenth Amendment as “the overthrow of Constitutional liberty.”
     As Luxenberg shows us, Harlan built his reputation mainly by following the political lead of others, but after he was appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1877, he became more independent. He was the only card in the judicial deck that Martinet and Tourgée could count on. He had filed the sole dissent in the so-called Civil Rights Cases in 1883. He had dissented when the Court upheld the Mississippi law mandating segregated cars on interstate trains, in 1890. He would later dissent, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the Court’s pro-business ruling in Lochner v. New York (1905).
     Harlan’s Plessy dissent seems unequivocal. “In the eye of the law,” he says, “there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He saw as well as Douglass did the long-term effect of the Court’s ruling, warning, “The judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.” When John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on civil rights from the Oval Office, in 1963—the speech that initiated the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—he quoted from Harlan’s dissent.
     Harlan’s conception of color blindness had limits, however. “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States,” he wrote in his dissent. “Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.” It seemed to him a blatant example of how arbitrary the Louisiana separate-cars statute was that it would permit “a Chinaman [to] ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens,” while forbidding African-Americans to do so. This head-spinning obiter dictum about the racial status of the Chinese helps explain why Holmes once compared Harlan’s mind to “a powerful vise the jaws of which couldn’t be got nearer than two inches to each other.”
     “Separate” is deeply researched, and it wears its learning lightly. It’s a storytelling kind of book, the kind of book that refers to Albion Tourgée as Albion and John Harlan as John, and that paints the scene for us (“On a bright and beautiful night in late October 1858 . . . ”). Luxenberg does not engage in psychological interpretation. He doesn’t mention, for instance, that Brown’s Yale classmates called him Henrietta because they thought he was effeminate—which might have contributed to Brown’s eagerness not to appear like a man who didn’t belong. And he dismisses in a footnote speculation that Robert Harlan, a man of mixed race who grew up as a member of John Harlan’s family, might have been a half brother. Even if he wasn’t in fact related to John, however, it might have mattered if John believed otherwise.
     Luxenberg skillfully works the military and the political background into his narrative. Still, despite ample quotations from letters and diaries, the three principals retain a sepia quality. They seem stiff, earnest, florid—Victorian. And there is a lot of biographical backstory. It takes four hundred pages to get to Homer Plessy; the argument and the decision are over after just twenty pages, and then the book abruptly ends. The afterlife of the case gets no real attention. Brown v. Board of Education receives a passing mention in a brief epilogue summarizing the post-Plessy lives of Brown, Harlan, and Tourgée.
     And it does seem a misjudgment to tell the story of an important civil-rights case as the story of three white men. The temptation is understandable. Tourgée, Brown, and Harlan left large archives; Martinet left nothing. Even Tourgée’s letters to Martinet working out their legal strategy are lost; we only have copies of four of them that Tourgée kept. Little is known about Homer Plessy outside his role as a test-case plaintiff. But, if we are trying to understand the Plessy case as a human story, Martinet and Plessy, and millions of other African-Americans, are the ones who took the risks and suffered the consequences.
     “Separate” is a different way to tell the story, but it does not give us a new story. It doesn’t help us with the big historical questions about the persistence of Southern racism after the Civil War. Those questions are central to David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski’s “Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction,” a fine-grained and valuable scholarly analysis. The authors argue that “rendering the South as peripheral to the history of the United States minimizes the extent to which the South was ‘co-creator of the nation’s history’ and obscures the ways in which the ideas and practices underpinning this racial order were projected across the United States.”
     As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five-per-cent bump. They also gained votes in the Electoral College. They suppressed the votes of their African-American residents, then got full representational credit for them.
     But where was the political will in the rest of the country? Separation of the races did not originate in the slave South. The nature of the institution made that impractical, if not impossible. As Luxenberg says—repeating one of the main points of C. Vann Woodward’s classic study “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” first published in 1955—segregation began in the North, where it was the product not of the practice of slavery but of Negrophobia. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” This helps explain why the majority opinion in Plessy was by a man from Massachusetts who had no experience with slavery, and the dissenter was a man from a slave state who had once owned slaves himself.
     After 1900, the South had Jim Crow, a legal regime of separatism, but the rest of the country had ghettos, redlining, gerrymandering, quota and exclusion systems, and the artifice of the local school district. De-facto discrimination—we now call it “institutional racism” or “structural racism”—is much harder to address. It requires more of people than just striking down a law. ♦

Louis Menand, a New Yorker magazine staff writer since 2001, was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016.
The New Yorker magazine, February 4, 2019. This article appears in the print edition of the February 4, 2019, issue, with the headline “In the Eye of the Law."

The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege by Ken Wytsma

Is privilege real or imagined?

The story of race and privilege in America is only picking up speed. More and more people are anxious and desire to go deeper to understand more specifically why America is the way she is and, more importantly, what we can do to intentionally promote unity and equality, starting with the church.

It's clear that issues of race and equality have come to the forefront in our nation's consciousness. Every week yet another incident involving racial tension splashes across headlines and dominates our news feeds. But it's not easy to unpack the origins of these tensions, and perhaps we wonder whether any of these issues really has anything to do with us. Ken Wytsma, founder of the Justice Conference, understands these questions. He has gone through his own journey of understanding the underpinnings of inequality and privilege. In this timely, insightful book Wytsma unpacks what we need to know to be grounded in conversations about today's race-related issues. And he helps us come to a deeper understanding of both the origins of these issues and the reconciling role we are called to play as witnesses of the gospel. Inequality and privilege are real. The Myth of Equality opens our eyes to realities we may have never realized were present in our society and world. And we will be changed for the better as a result.

“There is a lot of confusion around issues of race and privilege,” say Ken. “Far too often, people, in the dominant culture or evangelicals, either don’t understand the complexity of race, their complicity in the systems and structures that have oppressed others, or their biblical responsibility with regard to their neighbors.”